In general I’m a pretty snarky feminist film fan — I never even saw Titanic, and I just can’t bring myself to see a Katherine Heigl movie. But I have an embarrassing, persistent affection for the Sandra Bullock feature, Practical Magic (1998).

This led me to explore the nature of guilty pleasure viewing and to try to explain why this film works for me despite all its weaknesses. I’m so convinced by my conclusions — which come by insights from the terrific film The Celluloid Closet — that I’m now reluctant to call Practical Magic a guilty pleasure anymore.

I blogged about my class on the Holy Spirit this week, where I had an “aha” moment that connected Zizioulas and Congar (with diagrams!)

And I reflected on how the RC bishops are missing an opportunity in their response to marriage equality, even without challenging official church teaching on the subject: Marriage equality as a teaching moment.

On a lighter note, I also lobbied for St. Ephraim, Mary Magdalene, Thomas Merton, and the Apostle Thomas in this week’s Lent Madness silliness.

This one’s for the skeptics: a piece on honing your baloney detector. Online merchants peddling bogus cures for STIs, yeast infections, and other conditions have been on our radar lately, and this is a response to that.

I am part of a team of researchers at Yale University carrying out a large-scale study on issues related to sexuality and sexual minorities.

This completely anonymous online survey usually takes between ten and fifteen minutes. Please take this opportunity to express your views; your responses could be essential to the diversity of the sample.

Marks of the cross that don’t rub off : On the most important considerations of getting a tattoo, and whether those are being properly considered by members of a church Houston getting tattooed for Lent.

Warnings: this article is about the use of the word survivor, so covers some issues around abuse/violence, dealing with its impacts, and how others respond. I will not describe any abuse or other violence, but various victim-blaming and other negative responses are described in order to be refuted.

Contraception: A Women’s Right, The End of Patriarchy, or Both? Why all the uproar over the last few weeks about contraception/”religious freedom”? Let’s remember that historically speaking, women’s access to contraception and subsequent control of their sexuality and fertility have been revolutionary in patriarchal societies.

What Men Want: M.R.S. Degrees or PhDs? In the last century, conventional wisdom held that if a woman was more educated than her male counterpart, then she was less likely to be of marriageable quality. Recent research has now debunked that: women by and large are no longer penalized (by being less marriageable) for being as or even more educated than their marital prospects.

as we embark women’s herstory month, i have added a brief poetic scan of Black women’s struggle to come into a collective self up to the the 1970s (added as #2 of “geneses”). your words and reactions are more than welcomed since they will be helpful in the directions i take. “geneses” (plural for genesis, or beginning) is a multi-faceted piece in progress that looks at origin in different ways [examples: 1st: subconscious emergings (to be expanded), 2nd: pathways of struggle].

And It Was Wrong (www.anditwaswrong.com) is a project that’s been around for a few years, working to redefine “wrong” and validate the full spectrum of sexual assault. The new website was just launched a couple of weeks ago, and now you can read many of the stories online!

Last week, I published some examples of gendered science, especially in a blog entry called “Your heart and my back: two examples of gender-enhanced science” at http://curt-rice.com.

It starts like this:
Medical science improves our lives by developing treatments for illnesses. But if a treatment is going to work for everyone, research and testing must be done on a varied population. The challenges of science often lead to just the opposite situation. One way to test if a drug is actually having the hypothesized effect is to give it to several people who are otherwise as similar as possible.
Medical treatments may therefore be developed without sufficient testing on both men and women.

It starts with:
The “obvious” tension between diversity and quality leapt onto the front page this week through a debate at Smith College. And just in case you’re unsure, the putatively obvious connection is that increasing diversity decreases quality.
The debate at Smith presents a new twist on this issue, and it offers at least two lessons to university leaders everywhere.

Angie unduplicated

March 5, 2012 at 10:38 am

MacKenzie and Curt-Any research done by and for women should also be done on post-menopausal women. The example MacKenzie cites, referred to estrogen effects, including ERT. Many of us opt out of ERT, for reasons ranging from carcinogenicity to expense.
ephemeradical: excellent, seriously helpful post. The material on neuronic pathways makes me consider physical patterning as a shadetree-mechanical possibility for neurogenesis to heal or bypass my ingrained trauma responses.